Dir. Sean Penn, US, 2007, 148 mins
Cast: Emile Hirsch, William Hurt, Vince Vaughan
Review by Carol Allen
Penn's film is based on Jon Krakauer's bestseller of the same name, which tells the true life story of 24 year old Christopher McCandless, who gave away his trust fund to charity and set off on a trek round America to find himself and the meaning of life, culminating in 113 days alone in the Alaskan wilderness.
Although Chris's journey took place in the early nineties, the character is a bit of a seventies hippy figure in his anti-consumerist philosophy. His attempt to break away from what he sees as the pre-ordained path that society and his parents have set out for him is comparable to what many people are looking for when they turn to drugs. He also has many unlikeable qualities. He is naïve, cocky with the arrogance of youth, and selfishly thoughtless, abruptly disappearing as he does from home, sheltering behind his adopted and rather pretentious pseudonym of Alexander Supertramp and making no effort to contact his worried family. Hirsch's very engaging performance, however, forces us like him and empathise with his quest.
Apart from its main character a lot of the film's interest comes from the breathtaking beauty of the American landscapes through which he travels and the colourful characters he meets on the way. Vaughan plays Wayne, a grain farmer who befriends Chris, gives him a job and is later arrested for a crime about which the film is not very clear. Catherine Keener is hippy fellow traveller Jan, who takes him under her motherly wing for a while, and most notable is Hal Holbrook as the elderly man, who meets Chris shortly before he goes into the Alaskan wilderness and sees in him both his own youthful self and the son he never had. It is a superb and memorable performance. Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden make a strong impression with comparatively little screen time as the parents Chris is running away from, though his apparent hatred of them again makes him less sympathetic, in that their only sins appear to be arguing with each other, wanting what they see as best for their son and failing to tell him that Mum was pregnant with Chris when they got married, which is pretty mild stuff compared to some childhoods. Chris's sister Carine (Jena Malone), on whose diaries and recollections much of Krakauer's book is based, would appear to have been very close to him in real life but, although it is Malone's voice-over narrating the story, their closeness is not reflected very strongly in the film.
There are some beautiful moments, particularly in the Alaskan sequences of solitude such as Chris's discovery of the broken down old charabanc he joyfully comes upon in the wilderness, which he christens the "Magic Bus" and makes his home, or a telling sequence, where he finds himself unable to kill an animal for food, when he realises she's a mother with her young one. Very civilised of him, but it also demonstrates how ill prepared and unsuited he really was for the path he chose and why it resulted in his demise.
|
